How to Navigate the Adobe Creative Suite
The Adobe Creative Suite is the reigning set of tools used by industry professionals. Adobe has become the creative standard with their applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere, Audition, and others being the basic level of comprehension needed to sustain a successful creative career. As a professional designer I personally use multiple Adobe programs every day and by knowing how to use these tools I help companies, brands, and individuals look much more exciting.
Since Adobe has become the standard it’s important to understand what the applications are capable of, and which program is best for certain situations. While each program is incredibly advanced, they do have their limitations so unfortunately not one application can solve every creative problem. There is now 20+ applications available to download in the full Adobe Creative Suite and in this article, we will break down what the main purpose of each application is and when to use them.
Photoshop: What is it?
The most common and accessible Adobe application. Photoshop isn’t just name it’s a verb as well, which means to intentionally manipulate photography. A few things Photoshop handles best is color correction, content manipulation, and digitally hand-drawn images with organic bushes and textures. Photoshop ideally works best with photography but can also be used to help animators with frame-by-frame animation.
Best for these types of projects: Photography and editing, collages and composting, cel animation, and heavy textures.
Illustrator: What is it?
Illustrator is creation tool focused on building new vector graphics. Scalable, editable vector graphics are the industry standard when it comes to branding and marketing. Illustrator has the widest range of tools that can handle gradients, typography, and custom shapes and patterns. It’s also a great ideation tool that allows for a large workspace to play in.
Best for these types of projects: Logo creation and ideation, custom branding and marketing assets (social media), posters, banners, and single-page print media, character vectorization and rigging, vector and geometric illustration.
Acrobat: What is it?
Acrobat is the Adobe’s PDF viewer. While there are several ways to open and view a PDF, Acrobat provides wide range of editing and collaboration options. With Acrobat you can sign documents, reorganize pages, add hyperlinks, add text, edit text, annotate, resize, play GIFs, embed videos, and many other options. Acrobat doesn’t just display PDFs; it makes them highly collaborative.
Best for these types of projects: Scripts, presentation viewing, storyboards
InDesign: What is it?
InDesign was made to create multi-page CMYK print documents. It has a large range of export options for printing different types of books, pamphlets, and brochures. It’s editing features are great for adding large amounts text and imagery with clean grids. You can also make custom vector shapes and designs although it is less intuitive that Illustrator.
Best for these types of projects: Book layouts, presentation building, storyboarding, marketing print materials (brochures, flyers, pamphlets).
XD: What is it?
Adobe XD is a cloud-based UI prototyping application. It’s vector-based design capabilities are like combining live web design with Illustrator functionality, which cuts out the need for any 3rd party prototyping apps. Easily design new shapes, buttons, graphics, and even animations without worrying about coding limitations. You can also easily ideate and collaborate by just sharing a project link.
Best for these types of projects: UX/UI design, Prototyping
Premiere Pro: What is it?
Premiere is the preferred application for video editing. It can instantly play back high-quality raw footage and editors can creatively cut, manipulate, sync, and even animate footage. There’s a wide range or export options and plugin customizability so people can streamline processes and handle more than just the video. There’s also a range of accessible Premiere options for people who want to edit on their phones or do more casual video editing.
Best for these types of projects: Video editing, compositing, color grading, social media conten.
After Effects: What is it?
After Effects is used for animating custom graphics. Mainly focusing on 2D animations, After Effects is a great tool for animated shapes, logos, and textures for marketing videos, character rigging and animation, storytelling, visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing. In After Effects almost any effect or manipulation can be keyframed. Also apply interactive scripts to streamline bulk animation effects.
Best for these types of projects: character animation, explainer videos, animated brand assets, visual effects, motion tracking and video overlays
Bridge: What is it?
Adobe Bridge is for large-scale file organization incorporating many different application types all at once. It lets you edit filenames, metadata, keywords, and other parameters in bulk. You can also do bulk color-coordination with ease. It also lets you preview, edit, and publish creative assets quickly and easily with almost all Adobe Cloud applications including Dimension.
Best for these types of projects: Project wraps and deliveries, file organization and renaming, rebranding assets.
Character animator: What is it?
Adobe Character Animator specializes in character rigging and advanced animation techniques that can by synced to live video. Create your own custom characters or pick from pre-made character templates. Using your camera the character can move with you, blink with you, and sync up mouth movements with your script.
Best for these types of projects: Talking head/explainer videos with avatars, marketing videos, social media.
Audition: What is it?
Adobe Audition is for audio editing and sound design. Audition has the most capabilities when it comes to manipulating sounds, editing music tracks, creating sound design, adding sound effects, and exporting audio.
Best for these types of projects: Music cutdowns and edits, creating jingles and branded audio, sound design for video or animation
Media Encoder: What is it?
Media Encoder is a video renderer, encoder, converter, and compressor. This handy application can take a video or animation project and render the media in a separate application that doesn’t interfere with your workflow. You can also do batch rendering, converting, or compressing with multiple files at the same time with easily editable naming conventions.
Best for these types of projects: Converting and compressing video, large batch rendering and exporting, projects with several video deliverables
Lightroom: What is it?
Adobe Lightroom was created to handle large amounts of photographs. There are many similarities between Lightroom and Photoshop since they have the same color correction capabilities, but Lightroom is preferred when downloading or processing several images at once due it’s organizational capabilities. You can also do batch editing and color correction which can save photographers a ton of time.
Best for these types of projects: Photoshoots
Dimension: What is it?
Adobe Dimension is a 3D compositing application. While it’s not as robust as the more industry-standard 3D applications, Dimension provides a lot of opportunities to make engaging 3D graphics. You can make 3D logos, test packaging design, create product models, make dynamic typography, and play with the lighting. While Dimension has good modeling features, the animation capabilities are limited.
Best for these types of projects: 3D branding assets, packaging design, 3D product models
Dreamweaver: What is it?
Adobe Dreamweaver a web design application where you can design and publish web pages almost anywhere that supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. It gives creates control over the web page’s HTML and CSS in a “code view,” and allows for real-time graphic updates that can be easily published to a live site.
Best for these types of projects: Website portfolios
Animate: What is it?
Adobe Animate is the new and evolved Flash player. Its focus is vector animation and is a mostly frame-by-frame animator tool. You can also program interactive animations to create flash player games or send Animate files to After Effects to easily publish to multiple platforms. So people like to say, “Flash is dead,” but the truth is it’s not dead, just rebranded.
Best for these types of projects: Website animations (HTML5, SVGs, and WebGL), Customized flash player gaming
InCopy: What is it?
Adobe InCopy is a writing application like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Easily type large amounts of text, track changes, and format text the same way you do in most typing applications. The main benefit of InCopy is its seamless integration with InDesign so it’s easy to not only write, but design and print more efficiently.
Best for these types of projects: Script writing, book/narrative writing, blogs, articles, and content marketing
Aero(Beta): What is it?
Adobe Aero is an augmented reality application. It’s currently in the Beta stage, but Aero lets you take custom art, designs, and animations and with your device camera and lets you view them in 3D space. Create and control your own layering and depth to create things the come alive when you look at them through a camera lens. You can also share AR files with friends as well.
Best for these types of projects: 3D takeaway posters, AR art gallery displays and installations
Substance 3D Painter: What is it?
Adobe Substance 3D Painter used to be known as “Substance 3D” before joining the Adobe family. This application is used for creating custom textures and then mapping them into 3D objects to create realistic-looking 3D graphics. There are limitations, as this program cannot create or animate 3D models, it can only do the UV mapping and work with other 2D-based programs.
Best for these types of projects: 3D background and setting design, 3D character design, 3D texture design
Behance: What is it?
Behance is Adobe’s social network website. Creators can post what they make onto Behance and like, share, comment, and follow each other. Behance is all about linking creators all around the world. You can search for many different types of creative media for inspiration, watch artist and designer live streams, and even job hunt.
Best for these types of projects: Mood boards, design research and benchmarking, creative job searching.
Camera Raw: What is it?
A specialized application, Adobe Camera Raw is for importing, converting, and enhancing raw images and video. Camera Raw is not a standalone program like Photoshop or Lightroom, it must be used in combination with Photoshop, Bridge, or After Effects to see the content. In Camera Raw you can also enhance, and color correct before moving into another application.
Best for these types of projects: Photoshoots, video shoots
UXP Developer Tool: What is it?
The Adobe UXP Developer Tool is used to manage plugins that are compatible with Photoshop and other UXP-powered applications. This application has plugin templates available to get started, or you can debug custom-made plugins you are currently building.
Best for these types of projects: Photoshop plugins, other UXP-powered application plugins
In Summary:
It’s important to note that each Adobe application is very robust and multi-faceted. While each application was made for a specific intention, there are a lot of overlapping capabilities between all of them. This gives creators a chance to have preferred applications they handle most of their tasks in without having to switch between multiple programs. In this article we talked about high-level capabilities and intentions, but it’s important to try different applications out for yourself and see if its workflow is right for you.
Depending on your goals or industry you might not need the entire creative suite and can get by with a couple applications. For designers, animators, or any creative team, the full suite is a must to be able to tackle any and every type of creative challenge. Adobe is also developing new tools as new technology like AR and VR become more mainstream, so routinely check in to see if there’s any new downloads available in the creative suite.
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You can find more educational content about video production, animation, design, and more on our learning hub, The Creative Toolkit for Marketers, including: